This workshop explores the spiritual as a historical dimension. Modern historiography has rethought historical agency, yet spiritual agency has proven more difficult to incorporate. Much political, social, and environmental history operates with a broadly secular framework: the spiritual is occasionally mentioned, sometimes dismissed, often rationalized – but rarely taken seriously on its own terms.

Recently, however, this “de-spiriting” of historiography has itself been criticized as a colonial academic practice, with several scholars arguing that the binary between the secular and “religion” constitutes a European imposition. How, then, can historians open themselves to broader notions of agency by taking spiritual agency seriously? What counts as evidence in such inquiries? And how can we engage spiritual realities without slipping into exoticization or epistemological relativism?

The workshop addresses these questions by focusing on things – plants, earth, stones, rivers, artifacts, blood, hair, among many others – as sites through which spirits manifest, operate, and communicate with the living. In doing so, it critically interrogates modern distinctions between the “supernatural” and the “physical”, treating them as historically contingent categories specific to particular geographies and social groups.

The workshop will take place over two half-days and is conceived as an authors’ meeting. Invited participants will discuss pre-circulated papers with the aim of publishing a special issue in a leading journal. External participants are welcome and kindly asked to register: Julia.tischler@clutterunibas.ch